Antibacterial fabrics have achieved widespread use in various articles including socks, underwear, diapers, bandages, and other uses, and in recent years has been under development as a measure to counter MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).
However, technical problems remain to be solved with respect to lowering the cost and increasing the stability of such fabrics, particularly for general use in disposable products, and for ensuring adequate safety and efficacy when used in products intended for skin-contact use. With respect to safety, fibers containing Ag-zeolites, Zr-zeolites or a stable distribution of chitosan particles as effective antibacterial agents, have been shown to be safe and efficacious.
Unfortunately, conventional antibacterial fibers as described above are expensive. Moreover, non-woven fabrics constructed using such fibers alone must have an increased basis weight in order to provide the fabric with sufficient strength for their intended use. Increasing the basis weight results in a further unacceptable increase in cost of the fabrics.
According to the prior art, attempts have been made to provide a suitably strong non-woven fabric with an acceptable antibacterial property, but with little success. In particular, antibacterial fibers have been uniformly mixed with other suitable lesser expensive fibers lacking an antibacterial property, then laid to form a non-woven fabric. In such a case, the proportion of antibacterial fibers in the mixture needs to be higher than about 50% to provide the non-woven fabric with sufficient strength for practical use. Unfortunately, a corresponding proportion of about 50% antibacterial fibers is insufficient to provide an effective antibacterial property to the fabric.